OM-D Matters

I bought the OM-D less than a month ago. Being a Canon DSLR user (and Fuji X10 for auto-everything), I am used to using almost all of Adobe Lightroom’s feature from auto-tone to lens profile correction, color fringing removal, etc. However, on using the OM-D, I noticed some odd but rather important matters:

– No lens correction for raw files (Olympus lenses are not even listed under the manufacturer portion). I don’t know if there is some way to correct this as I am not yet very familiar with the camera’s settings and menu (I don’t even know yet how to set the lens function button). I set auto-distortion to off to extract the maximum resolution from the camera. However, when the times comes that I have to take a picture of object with straight edges (e.g., buildings, doors, etc.), the curvy lines are very noticeable. I must find a way to correct this!

– No color space/profile choices. I believe this is not limited to Olympus OM-D. When using Canon or Nikon DSLRs, Lightroom allows you to choose the color profile as either Adobe RGB or the camera colors (standard, faithful, neutral, portrait, landscape). This option is not available for Olympus OM-D and my Fuji X10. I think this is more of a support issue from Adobe rather than camera issue.

Also, DX0mark rates the ISO of the OM-D as ISO 826 and for the Canon 7D as ISO 854, they are worlds away when shooting at high ISO (1600 or higher). The Canon 7D has finer grain and less color artifacts. Of course the biggest difference between the two cameras is SIZE. The OM-D a very small camera and the 7D a very large camera (especially with the battery grip almost permanently attached).

I bought the Kiwiphoto Canon EF-m4/3 adaptor to use my existing DSLR lenses. As expected, my Canon EF lenses can only be used wide open (no stopping down of aperture, unless I stop the lens in the Canon camera before dismounting it). For my two Samyang lenses (85mm 1.4 and 8mm fisheye, the aperture can be controlled via lens aperture ring so no problem). The camera-adaptor-lens works ok on most of the lenses (the Olympus IBIS works ok). What I did not expect is that the combination won’t focus for wide-angle lenses. My 8mm fisheye won’t focus at all (focused past infinity) and my Canon 10-22mm works only at 17mm and above. I don’t know if this is an adaptor issue or a camera (flange distance) issue. If this is an adaptor issue, then my 100mm macro lens is not working at the closest focusing distance.

This of course is for experiments only as the combination of the OM-D with any of my regular SLR lenses will be unwieldy (a very large lens with a small camera). Possibly, I’ll use the OM-D with the Samyang 85mm (plus Nikon F-Canon EF and Canon EF-M4/3 adapters), Tamron 70-300 (600mm equivalent!) and Canon 100mm macro (if I’m at home and macro resolution is required – the 12-50mm macro is very good but not as good as the 100mm).